I don't know anything, I just live here

It's the home of Richie Cunningham and "Laverne and Shirley" but, other than those little diversions, Milwaukee is not a very exciting town. Clearly I will not be writing a guide book about it any time soon. But life is not about the destination, it's about the journey. And the experiences we had on Saturday made for one very interesting journey.

Setting off at 8.15am on Saturday morning, the boys and I met up with Irene on the slowest 151 bus EVER to take us all the way into town to Union Station. Starbucks in hand, we reached the station in the drizzle and tried to make sense of the traffic jam of buses all destined for different cities of the Midwest. Our bus tickets were only $10 each (return), but I didn't exactly want to find out I was on my way to Cleveland instead of Milwaukee, although such a thing would not have come as a complete surprise!

But we caught the right bus and Josh and I spent the 90-minute journey trying to explain the rules of AFL to Irene, who was a little befuddled anyway because she thought we were taking the train to Milwaukee.

By the time we reached Wisconsin the weather had fined up and we set off exploring the Art Gallery, a little put out that the train station was so far out of the centre of the city. Milwaukee on a Saturday morning was a virtual ghost town, not at all the buzzing metropolis I was expecting. I counted three cabs. Slightly better than Ballarat, but not by much.

Our attention was diverted by a neat little blue motorboat put-putting along the river that bisects the city. It was akin to a paddleboat like you'd find on the River Torrens back home, but the fact it was motorised made it all the more attractive to the boys, Rene, and me. Naturally. So we stopped a local and asked where we could rent one. She looked at us like we were from Mars. And she clearly had no idea what we were talking about. Had we all hallucinated the motor boat after all? No, surely not. So we asked the tourist trolley driver. He was clearly a tourist who had hijacked the trolley, for he didn't have a clue either. By this time I was exasperated beyond measure. Two locals in the space of ten minutes had absolutely no idea where to hire a bright blue motorised boat to navigate the major river in their own city. What kind of place had we come to?

There was some debate about how long it would take in a cab to get to the footy oval - was it 15 minutes? 30 minutes? Irene graciously offered to hire a car and get us there in one piece as best she could. But we walked to two separate car rental places. Just like Goldilocks, the first one was closed and the second one was all booked out. I nearly put my head through a wall at this point.

So we got in one of the three cabs in Milwaukee, driven by a very large man with earthworms in his back garden as big as the fat finger he wiggled at me from the front seat. And we proceeded to drive, and drive, and drive, to a football oval as geographically removed from downtown Milwaukee as you're ever likely to find.

And to top it all off, the Chicago team lost.

Just when fate was smiling on us and we were offered a ride back to Chicago with one of the footy boys, an absolute nutter of an American player decided to ride shotgun and then proceeded to talk about nothing the entire way home. I think he might have taken one too many hard hits in the head, because his conversation made absolutely no sense, and he didn't seem to realise we were all talking about something completely different around him.

It was a very long day in Milwaukee, and an even longer 90 minute return journey to the Windy City, with no ejector seats in the back of the car.